When you’re dizzy, fix your eyes on the horizon. Find a faraway point and focus attention there. I don’t remember learning this; it feels like something I’ve always known. I suspect this is a piece of wisdom that came from my parents. As a kid I used to get queasy in the backseat of their big old Cadillac. (This was in Texas, back when gasoline was cheap and no one worried about the climate.) They must have taught me this trick. Somehow it can smooth the bumps of the ride. 

I’m spending a lot of time looking at the horizon these days. We live surrounded by hills, and I love admiring the spot where they meet the heavens. I’ve taken a near-infinite number of photographs of the sky at the horizon as it changes. Lately, gazing at the horizon feels like my childhood exercise of seeking balance and inner stillness in a moving car. The world is moving fast, the road is full of turns, and it is difficult to trust that we’re headed in the right direction.

So as I look at the place where sky kisses the hills, it becomes my fixed point when the world is spinning. I look at the landscape and I think about what lasts longer than we do. I think about how Judaism was around long before any of us were, and how it will be here long after we’re gone. I think about the slow arc of human progress as we try to bend the moral universe toward justice. We’re not the first generation to struggle with how long that’s taking.

Long ago, chronicled in parashat Vayetzei, the patriarch Jacob journeyed from Beersheva toward Haran. He stopped for the night at sundown, and he placed a stone under his head. He dreamed of a ladder planted in the earth with angels going up and down. When he woke, he declared that God was in that place (Gen. 28:16) and he hadn’t known. Spiritual life is a series of these awakenings. We lose sight of what matters, and then we regain it. And again.

And again. Judaism has long embraced the tension between imagining God in particular holy places (e.g. Beth El, the spot where Jacob had his revelation – or the Kotel – or the Temple Mount – or Jerusalem – or the Land of Promise writ large) and imagining that God is everywhere. In Isaiah’s words, “All the earth is full of God’s glory.” (Isaiah 6:3) After the fall of the Temple our mystics imagined the Shekhinah, God’s indwelling presence, in exile with us.

Where is God? The Hasidic master known as the Kotzker rebbe famously answered, wherever we let God in. Jacob figured that out: “God is in this place, and I did not know.” God is always in this place, even in our places of uncertainty. It’s easier for me to see God in the fixed point on the horizon that helps me stay stable and ethically upright. I struggle sometimes to remember that God can also be found in every stone along the twisting path. In this place? Really? 

I find comfort in looking toward the horizon. It’s like looking toward the messianic future of a world redeemed: I don’t for an instant imagine that humanity will get there in my lifetime, but it’s a direction, an orientation. This year I’m trying to learn better how to look down at my own feet on the circuitous path. I want to seek (even if I can’t see) God here in this place. Even when it feels like we’re going the wrong way – even like the whole world is going the wrong way.

Lately a lot of you have told me that you feel like the world is going the wrong way. Some of the rights we take for granted here, like the right to reproductive health care or the right to access the healthcare our doctors prescribe for our children, no longer hold true across the country. Measles seems to be returning; polio might do the same. The climate crisis is in everyone’s backyard, including ours – the Butternut fire in Great Barrington was only just contained. 

It’s so easy to get bogged down in every injustice. So much is not as it should be, which cues up the existential carsickness. But if all I ever do is look at the horizon, I’m not here and now. I’m projecting myself into an imagined future, or maybe into an imagined past. Neither one of those helps anyone. I don’t want to just be a passenger, gazing at the sky. Jewishly I also feel an obligation to do something: to feed somebody hungry, to comfort someone who’s afraid…

I think that’s the real work. It’s ok to feel afraid. And, we need to help each other move beyond the paralysis of fear and instead do something to help someone in need. Find one small good thing you can do for someone in the coming week. This week maybe it’s standing up for trans kids who need support. Donate to the ACLU. Connect with the Reform Action Center, the tikkun olam arm of the Reform movement, to support the LGBTQ community here and elsewhere. 

God is in the fixed point of distant steadiness and is wrapped around us as we traverse every switchback. God is in our hopes for a better future, and God is also in this deeply imperfect present. I think if we can really hold on to that, we might feel centered even when the world feels upside-down. “God is in this place, and I did not know” – I think when we help each other, when we stand up for each other, together we manifest God’s presence in the place where we are. 

This is the d’varling that Rabbi Rachel offered at Shabbat morning services (cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi).